I LOVED working the drive through. You have to have your crap together though or it will be bad. The people working there were generally really nice. The shift drinks ad free coffee each week were great, not to mention the 30% off discount that I probably used too much :) I am a morning person too, so I loved that my 8 hours for the day could be done at 1.

Cons

Late nights, frequent transitions in management. One manager I had was a horrible mess as a barista. We didn't know what to do because we couldn't tell the store manager she wasn't good, but it made everything so slow. She was trying though, so we just let her.

Store level employees and management were great. Mostly flexible work schedules. Coffee is genuinely good. Caribou is based out of Mpls./St. Paul, so opportunities to transfer to alternate stores within the Twin Cities were ample.

Cons

Too much turn-over at the district and store manager levels. Compensation and raises were paltry. Poor benefits when compared to Starbucks. At the time I left Caribou was exploding with unfocused growth. Stores were flying up everywhere. Caribou branding was being latched onto ice creams, snack bars, and just about anything you could fit onto a grocery store shelf. It wouldn't have surprised me if I'd shown up to work one day, and found that Caribou had partnered with Ford Motors and we were expected to sell X number Caribou Cars per store per month. Of course all of this trickled down to the store level were initiatives were started and abandoned frequently. Goals were set, and then reset constantly. District Managers were left trying to implement all these changes, which led to pressure on Store Managers, which led to a lot of leadership turn-over at the Store and District Manager level, which led to turn-over of hourly employees, which led to store morale problems. In short, it was a hot mess. It appeared, at least to me, that this was company being run by a series of committees. Each tasked with focusing on different areas of the business, and with little focus on how everything was going to fit together. I can't help but think that if the CEO at the time had actually lived in MN, rather than GA and flying into MN to perform his work, that there would have been a set of eyes at the helm and a lot of the problems of the time might have been caught.

Advice to Management

Focus on your role as a coffee shop first and foremost. A CEO should live and work near the headquarters of the company she/he is heading.